Power is Affective and Embodied

"Power is a thing of the senses."

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 84.

Žižek on the Source of Islamic Fundamentalism

"As is well known, the problem of the Islamic world is that, since it was exposed to Western modernization abruptly (without adequate time to 'work through' the trauma of its impact, to construct a symbolic-fictional space/screen for it), the only possible reactions to this impact were either a superficial imitated modernization destined to fail (the Iranian Pahlavi regime, for example), or, in the absence of a proper symbolic space of fictions, a direct recourse to the violent Real, an outright war between Islamic truth and the Western Lie, with no space for symbolic mediation. In this 'fundamentalist' solution (a modern phenomenon with no direct links to Muslim traditions), the divine dimension reasserts itself in its superego-Real guise, as a murderous explosion of sacrificial violence necessary to placate the obscene superego divinity."


Slavoj Žižek, "Preface" The Fragile Absolute: Or Why Is The Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso Books, 2008), xi.

Rose on Hegel and Kierkegaard

"Hegel's 'speculative Good Friday' and Kierkegaard's 'scandal' act as the third which unsettle the dualisms of philosophy and make it possible to reconstruct the modern political history of unfreedom - above all, the inversions of morality and legality, autonomy and heteronomy."

Gillian Rose, "Is there a Jewish Philosophy?" Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 19.